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IoT Garage Door Opener Maker Bricks Customer's Product After Bad Review (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Denis Grisak, the man behind the Internet-connected garage opener Garadget, is having a very bad week. Grisak and his Colorado-based company SoftComplex launched Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle, on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February. But this week, his response to an unhappy customer has gotten Garadget a totally different sort of attention. On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget. He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board: "Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iPhone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here..." Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon: "Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY - iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products." Grisak then responded by bricking Martin's product remotely, posting on the support forum: "Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I'm happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I'm not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection."
. . . . . . reminding us that those buying IoT devices don't own anything useful, and that your f**cking GARAGE DOOR OPENER could be dependent not only on Internet connectivity but the continued willingness of a service provider (Garage Door Operation As a Service--GDOAAS?) to provide service, at whatever cost they deem fit. I'll leave my light bulbs, refrigerator, door locks, garage door opener, and thermostat off the Internet, thank you very much.
Sometimes the customer is wrong
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Other than a method to allow a hacker unauthorized access to your home, why on god's green earth would you need a wifi powered garage door opener *for your phone*, when the tried and true RF based ones have been around for decades?
i'm 34; am i too old to understand why people would want clownshit crazy things like this?
IOT is not great. The idea that billions of tiny insecure computers are all connected to the same public internet is absurd. Not to mention, everything is controlled through "the cloud" and service for a piece of hardware you bought could be terminated at any time.
Won't buy anything that relies on an app for full functionality. These fly by night startups have a good chance of either going out of business or abandoning old models within a year or two. Stuff for my house needs to last 10 years bare minimum, ideally with zero fiddling, re-configuring, firmware upgrading, or other jack-assery.
Light switches fit that bill just great, so far apps don't have anything remotely close to that functionality to maintenance ratio.
IoT should be about open protocols and services. Devices that can only connect to their proprietary servers should be called "AOL of things" instead.
Surely smart IoT device makers wouldn't eventually discontinue the service, like, oh, say, Plays For Sure did. Or Zune.
But then there are multiple security issues too. Including a hacker getting code into a device in your home, thus getting a beach head, no mater how well your firewall is configured.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Who cares? It was a dick move regardless of what the EULA says.
I haven't figured out what law yet, but I get the feeling that blocking all functionality of a customer's electronic device out of spite, and specifically a device for access control to a dwelling, might not have been a legal act. There might be penalties under civil or criminal law.
I'd cut more slack for an Open Source developer who simply refused to help the user because of abusive language, since that developer isn't being paid and the user didn't pay anyone for the software or service. But to lock out a paid customer...
Bruce Perens.
Yes. Refusing to do business with someone for reasons outside of the various protected classes is a choice a business can make. In a lot of cases that's a bad choice since your competitors who don't do that will have a bigger market of potential buyers. However, sometimes a customer can be unprofitable and it might make sense. You'll note that land lords do this all the time, as do credit card companies - though they do have some clear not-generic-business reasons. Some restaurants will often refuse service to people who don't meet a dress code. Many stores will refuse to do business with someone who is abusive to their staff. And so on.
However, destroying the product that you have already sold to someone is an entirely different matter. That really should be obvious.
This device is not a garage door opener. It's an add-on for one, which connects it to the internet so you can check on the status of your door from a phone app (in case you're worried you forgot to close it).
The company disabled the cloud access to this guy's device, rendering it completely useless for the only thing it's good for. The customer couldn't get remote access working anyway, but that's the only thing that device is for! So instead of fixing his issue, they locked him out of using his own device (maybe some friend could have gotten it working for him), all because he posted a bad review. If you can't see why this is wrong on many levels, I can't help you.
You just replied to a comment ending in "but lets not confuse what actually happened" by adding pure speculation on something that may have never happened???
Then finish by saying: "I know what Garadget I'm never going to buy."
- Never go full retard
If you're going to sell to the public you'd better thicken your skin a bit. Fighting a tantrum with your own tantrum is childish, and will cost this guy some business.
Bullshit. The device was bricked. The device is utterly unusable without the cloud account that it's linked to, so that's no different than "bricking".
No, making something that someone paid for unusable, after the sale, is NOT justified, ever, for anything. If you want to decline to provide further support because of abusive language, that's fine, even if that means they can't figure out how to get it working on their own, but that's very different from bricking it, which is utterly spiteful.
No, making something that someone paid for unusable, after the sale, is NOT justified, ever, for anything.
Uh, Samsung Note 7?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.